


we used to be frozen

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Actors, Alternate Reality, Blankets, Chess, Falling In Love, First Meetings, In Which Everyone is Single, M/M, Nightmares, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-03
Updated: 2013-11-03
Packaged: 2017-12-31 09:51:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James walks at night because his current film role is giving him bad dreams.</p><p>He stumbles onto another film in production, and finds Michael.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we used to be frozen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luninosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/gifts).



> Sort of kind of for the following prompt from the [McFassy Autumn Extravaganza](http://mcfassy.livejournal.com/499237.html):
> 
> _Blankets, cozy evenings, cuddling against the chill. Perhaps it’s the first autumn they’ve spent together; and pumpkin-spice flavors and shared candlelight are even better when falling in love._
> 
> \---
> 
> Thanks to Afrocurl for the quick beta.

James rolled over with a gasp. Didn’t want to open his eyes, for fear of the nightmare that might still be standing over him. He could hear his breath, loud and panicked in the deceptive still of the night.

“Wake up,” he told himself, and pushed himself upright. Groped for his smartphone on the nightstand. Felt around blindly to unlock the screen. Only when he could sense the wash of diffuse white light against his face did he open his eyes.

Now he could see his own breath, hanging in startled clouds around him, around the bed. The cold of the night had crept in on him while he stumbled through his dreams. Now there was frost like hooks settling into his skin, trying to pull away what little warmth he had.

Dreams of garish lighting and cigarette smoke. The role was getting to him. He was playing a sleazy cop, a right pig-fucking bastard, no way out of a hopeless entropic spiral into madness. He’d had to drink and he’d had to pretend to be on drugs.

Soon they’d shoot the bit where the character broke from reality, finally and completely, and it was the last thing they needed to do and it was the last thing he wanted to do.

He really, really fucking hated his character right now, because he was pretty sure he’d fallen headlong into the dreams just as soon as he’d gotten dropped into the role.

Shivering and sweating at the same time, unnerved by the amorphous shadows of his nightmares, he struggled to put some clothes on. A jumper with an unraveling sleeve, a many-times-stomped-on leather jacket, an inside-out ski cap. There was a hole in one of his socks, just enough for his little toe to protrude. The exposed bit of nail was dirty.

Lights on in the rest of the flat, but he didn’t dare look into the mirror. There was something about the face that he was currently wearing that was both him and not him, and that was just the first thing that unnerved him. Ginger beard flecked with gray; ditto for his unkempt, greasy hair. Deep shadows like terrible bruises beneath his eyes. Traces of makeup and fake scarring and track marks.

James’s hands shook as he pulled his gloves on and made his way out into the night.

***

There was, of course, no warmth to be found outside. Cold stabbing wind. Indifferent faces. Patches of frozen ice on the sidewalk.

James ducked into the nearest all-night shop and bought a cheap candy bar, as much to get out of the wind as for the sugar rush. The man at the till looked at him with a confused, narrow-eyed gaze. He couldn’t blame the man for looking at him like that; if he’d been looking out through the man’s eyes at his own haggard face, he wouldn’t have trusted it, either.

More walking. Footsteps passed him by from time to time. He passed windows and people, and they were arguing and indifferent and frozen, and there were very few smiles to be found.

He wanted to go home.

“Sir, I’m sorry, you can’t pass this way,” a girl in a long quilted coat and – oddly enough – a belt made of some kind of reflective material said when he turned the next corner. She was standing next to a set of metal crowd-control barriers.

James looked behind him, then turned back to her. “I’m so sorry, were you talking to me?”

A quick smile, perhaps meant to be reassuring. “Yes, sir. You’ll have to keep walking. We have to keep the street clear; they’re setting up for another shot.”

James stomped some warmth into his feet, or tried to. “I hadn’t known there were other people filming here. I’ve just come from a set myself.”

“It’s quite all right, sir. Just – you’ll want to move on, is all.”

“I will, thank you. And again, I’m sorry for spacing out.”

“No problem, sir.”

James crossed to the other corner, put his arms around his own midsection. The night fell more deeply around him, and in the distance, he heard a female voice yell, “Cameras – and _action_!”

Patter of feet on the sidewalk, coming closer.

He peered at the approaching shape, tall and lean and moving in a hurry –

The girl in the long coat started and scampered out of the way –

And a man leaped over one of the barriers, just barely clearing it, before landing and then sitting down hard in the gutter. He looked surprised and startled, eyes wide open, steam rising from his exposed hands and his hunched-over shoulders. An expression of shock was frozen on his face, which seemed to be all angles and sharp-shadowed relief.

Dress shirt with red-stained cuffs, suit trousers that had seen better days. A wilted collar and a nondescript tie, except that its hanging end was also spattered with red. Scuffed boots.

“CUT!” called the other female voice. “You all right there?”

The man who’d jumped the barrier said, after a short pause, “I think I’m still alive.”

A second pause, slightly longer, and then another woman came up to the man. She was dressed all in black except for the bright yellow-and-black scarf looped around her neck. “That was pretty good,” she said. “And we’ll definitely use that jump.”

“Okay,” the man said. “I’ll – I’m off for the night, then?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “I want you back here in three nights, no sooner. Because the next things we’re shooting I don’t want you to look like shit for, all right, Michael?”

The man who was apparently named Michael nodded, once, and he brushed off the girl in the long coat’s attempts to help him up, before he started walking in James’s direction and then past him.

James caught a mutter of “Fuck this cold weather” and couldn’t have sympathized more.

On a whim, he took the candy bar from his pocket and called, “Michael.”

Michael turned around, looking worn-out. Now that they were nowhere near the bright lights of the street setup, it was a little more difficult to make out the color of his eyes. He looked uncertain, but he stayed where he was.

James approached him slowly, carefully, as though Michael were a wild animal, skittish and caught between fight or flight. “Hello,” he said. “I’m James. Do you want some candy? You look like you could use it.”

“I could, yes, but I can’t take that,” Michael said. “It’s yours.”

“Sure it’s mine, but it could be yours too, if we share,” James said as he broke the bar in half and held out the larger piece.

Pause. “Okay,” Michael said, looking hungry and dubious all at once.

Peanut and caramel filling in indifferent milk chocolate, the whole thing far too sweet for James’s tastes, but the sugar was a welcome change from the cold and the night. “Bad for me, I know,” he said as he wadded up the wrapper, “but I suppose I could tell _my_ director it’d be just the thing for my character to eat.”

“Oh, you’re working on something too? Didn’t know we weren’t the only ones.”

“That’s what I told your security girl back there, just before she shooed me out of the shot. Very nice and professional, that one.”

Michael looked back at the set as it was broken down and put away. “Jen’s pretty good at her job. Doesn’t think like an intern or a PA at all. Keen mind for a story.”

James nodded. “Friend of yours?”

“After a fashion.” Michael inclined his head, and began to walk, and James fell into step beside him. “Least I can do for your kindness is repay you with a coffee; my trailer’s this way.”

“Tea, if you have it?” James said, a little hopefully.

“Okay, I think I have that too.”

But the first thing he saw when Michael waved him in wasn’t the chess board set up near the window: it was the space heater beneath that table. “I need to get myself one of those; I think the thermostat in my flat’s not working,” he said.

Michael made a surprised/alarmed noise. “Your director know about that?”

“Yes, and he tells me I’m not to do anything about it till after the next sequence is over.”

“That’s not very nice of him,” was Michael’s observation, delivered with a perfectly blank face.

“It’s not, but he’s not really like that all the time. It’s just for now. He’s a wonderful person when he’s not working, just very driven, a big believer in the totality of the experience, for the actor and thence the viewer.” James shrugged, though he imagined he could feel his joints creaking and cracking in protest.

“But I can feel you being cold from all the way over here,” Michael said as he dropped into the chair on the black side of the chess board.

“I’ll be fine, really, thank you – this tea is nice,” James said as he sipped gingerly from the chipped mug. It left a thin glaze of pumpkin flavor on his tongue.

Michael’s mouth twitched and he reached for the blanket/throw draped over his bed, and tossed it in James’s direction.

“Won’t you need this?” James asked even as he wrapped it around his shoulders. It looked awful – faded purple and magenta and, inexplicably, green – but it was warm, and the rough texture of it felt nice even through his gloves.

“Call it my turn, because you gave me candy.”

“I thought that was the tea,” James said.

A noise went off behind him and Michael sighed and got up again, and his footsteps seemed to shake the whole trailer as he made his way past James a second, then a third time as he returned.

There was a faint whiff of spice emanating from whatever coffee Michael’d just brewed, and James couldn’t stop himself from taking a deep breath and holding it, because it was comfortable and comforting too.

Much like the man he’d just met. There was something startlingly free and easy about their conversation – and about the quiet between them, too.

When James looked back up Michael’d moved one of his pawns forward two squares. He got up and settled down in the other chair – which creaked quietly beneath him, as though in welcome – and made his own opening move.

“Haven’t played with anyone in a while,” Michael said. “Normally it’s just me.”

James smiled, and wordlessly toasted him with his mug, and kept playing.

***

The first game turned into a second and then a third, and then James bought a travel chess set, the pocket-sized kind with magnets in the bottom of the pieces, and invited Michael over to his flat, about six weeks after their first meeting.

The last text message from Michael’d said he was about ten minutes out.

James took a moment to look at himself in the mirror.

The beard was gone at last, and so were the grease and the makeup. They were going to wrap principal photography soon, and he was beginning to slough off his character – and for that part he could only feel a sort of profound relief.

He fiddled with his collar and the cuffs on his shirt, and ran his hands self-consciously through his hair, and then there was a knock on the door.

He turned both of his brand new space heaters to a more moderate setting and went to let Michael in.

“You look nice,” were the first words out of Michael’s mouth. He was smiling, and there were deep amused lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. In this light, he had steel-colored eyes, bright and interested gray.

“Hark who’s talking,” James joked. “Look at you carrying boxes of fish and chips and curry, and looking like he’s swanning into some hideously expensive restaurant.”

That got him a laugh.

Their hands brushed several times as they set up the food and the chess board, and Michael was startlingly warm, and James couldn’t help but lean somewhat in his direction.

“I hear you’re almost done,” Michael said as they turned to dessert.

James had no idea where the upside-down pineapple cake’d come from; all he knew was that it was perfectly moist and sweet and tender.

“Yes,” he said after he’d savored another mouthful. “A few more days and then it’ll be home for me, and I will be ignoring my agent and most phone calls for two months. Maybe more. I haven’t thought about the next project yet. I think this one’s broken me, a little, and I need to get over it.”

“Hear, hear,” Michael said.

“And you?”

“Maybe another four weeks.” Michael made a face.

James made it right back at him. “That sucks.”

“Sucks big hairy smelly donkey bollocks,” Michael said in agreement. “And then I only get a week off, because I have to go to New York. Audition for the Scottish play.”

“Been there, done that,” James said encouragingly. “Loved it to bits. Break a leg, man.”

“I’ve never done Shakespeare before. Maybe you know someone who could help me.”

James grinned. “I do. If you can make it to London, come knock on my door. I give you my word it’s a nicer place than this.”

“I’d like that very much,” Michael said, looking right at him even as he laughed quietly.

James nodded back, and didn’t look away.

***

As soon as he checked in at the airport for his flight home, James wandered into one of the nearby shops and picked out a blanket, blue and gray tartan with thin stripes of red, and brought it to the counter to be gift-wrapped. “You deliver, don’t you?” he asked the elderly lady at the counter.

“Certainly, dear, just give me an address and we’ll have it there within the week.”

“Same day delivery possible?” When she nodded at him, James smiled and wrote down the address that Michael had texted him just that morning: the current production location.

He watched his own hands write down Michael’s name and couldn’t stop thinking about an easy warmth, an unstinting smile.

***

James came awake to the sound of his mobile phone ringing, a soft BRR BRR that vibrated pleasantly on his pillow. A familiar name on the display. “H’lo,” he slurred.

“Look out your window,” said Michael’s voice.

He half-slid and half-fell out of bed and went, pushing his curtains aside – and he started to laugh.

Michael was standing on the sidewalk two floors down, and instead of a jacket or a coat he was wearing the blanket James had sent him.

As James watched Michael’s broad, wide grin was interrupted by a huge yawn.

James raised an eyebrow, said into the phone, “Have you slept at all?”

“Nope,” was the slow reply.

“Come on up.”

James buzzed him in, and as soon as Michael was inside he took his hand, pulled him right through to the bedroom, motioned him into the bed. “Talk later, sleep first,” he said, not as briskly as he’d like, since he was still more than a little sleep-fuzzed himself. “No questions. Bring your blanket with you.”

As easy as sharing a candy bar, as easy as playing long languid games of chess, as easy as having a conversation: James tucked himself into Michael’s back, put his arms around him, took a deep breath of stale airport air and a familiar whiff of spice and coffee, and pulled him close.

He just barely heard Michael whispering, “James,” before there were cold hands wrapping around his, tight and real and good, hanging on to him.


End file.
